Rilla Askew's Blog

As an historical novelist I'm devoted equally to the historical record and to my own creative imaginings. Above all, I'm devoted to story. If I know the facts (and I work very hard to know them), I won't change them. Sometimes, though, to make the story work, I find I have to leave out some of the facts. My next few blog posts will be about what's factual in Prize for the Fire, what's been imagined, and also what's known about Anne's story that I've intentionally left out.

Anne Askew's own writings tell us much about her beliefs and the events at the end of her life. Thanks to the relatively good record-keeping of the Tudor era, we know additional facts about her family and the complicated religious and political milieu during Henry VIII's reign. We know Anne was the daughter of a Lincolnshire knight and was forced into an arranged marriage at a young age; that she had two children by her husband, Thomas Kyme, and was violently thrown out of the house by him; that she unsucessfully sought a divorce, took back her own name, moved to London and became a famous gospeller (one who expounded publicly on the Christian Bible). We know she was a writer; that she memorized prodigious amounts of Scripture, was put on trial for her beliefs, was tortured in the Tower of London, wrote a detailed account of her trials and torture, which was smuggled out of the prison by her maid, and that she was burned at the stake on 16 July 1546.

The above is recounted in The Examinations of Anne Askew, the collection of her writings published shortly after her death by the Reformist John Bale. But a casual scan of internet sources will bring up assertions about Anne that my deeper dive into her history contradicts. From the time of her death, Anne's story has been used as a polemic by both traditionalists and reformists, and I think this accounts for why some misleading assertions about her keep getting repeated, including, at this writing, on her Wikipedia page.

Wiki says, for instance, that she was an Anabaptist and a friend of the Anabaptist Joan Bocher, who was burned four years after Anne, but, looking at primary sources from Anne's era, I found no evidence of that. I did find that she was accused of being an anabaptist by her enemies, just as she was accused of being a sectary, a heretic, a morally loose woman. The tale that she was friends with Joan Bocher was first published 53 years after her death in a diatribe against both women by a Jesuit priest, Robert Persons, who had his own agenda. This was during the reign of the very Protestant Elizabeth I, and Persons, who was born the same year Anne died, said he'd learned all this from someone who had been at Bocher's trial. Make of that what you will. I didn't put it in my novel, except for a fleeting appearance by a "Sister Joan" in an evangelical meeting in a London brewery near the end of the book, which I slipped in like an Easter egg for scholars of the era to find.

One interesting fact I left out of the book is that Anne's father, Sir William Ayscough, served on the jury that condemned to death four of the purported lovers of Anne Boleyn. The trial was at Westminster on 12 May 1536, and Anne Boleyn lost her head seven days later. Prize for the Fire opens nine months after that. In drafting the novel, I wrote several versions where young Anne learns of her father's role on the jury and the condemned men's executions, as well as the beheading of Anne Boleyn, but it always came out as backstory, exposition, overheard conversations, and it carried the narrative too far from Anne's primary conflict—her grief and her miserable marriage—so this interesting historical tidbit remains a true part of Anne Askew's story but not of my book.

Next up in the series: Who's True. Who's Not.

   

Juxtaposing the covers for my newest novel, Prize for the Fire, with the paperback cover of Fire in Beulah, I think of the symbolism of fire, not only in the titles but in what these two books are about. I think, too, about how a cover image can become the book's characters in the reader's mind. While I'm writing, I hold a clear image of what the characters look like, and I try to evoke that image in words. But the picture on the cover can change everything—how the reader sees the character, and, ultimately, how I do. The young woman on the cover of Fire in Beulah has become Graceful for me, though the character in my mind looked quite different when I was writing the book. Now, though, I can't see Graceful any other way.

I initially had a different image in mind for the cover of Prize for the Fire. I worked on the novel for 20 years, holding the image of young Anne Askew in my mind. After the book was finished, I looked for a portrait of a 16th century girl that matched the Anne in my mind, and the young woman in that dark portrait matched perfectly. For technical reasons the designer couldn't use the image, though, so he found one very similar--close, but younger and saucier, less sad. I love the layout and design of the cover and am interested to see if this younger, saucier Anne replaces the girl in my mind. I expect after I've lived with her a while and carried her to bookstores and book clubs for readings, she will.

In my classes in short fiction we talk about creating the moment after which nothing will ever be the same. My students haven’t lived through one like this before. Sometimes the moment is dramatic, a violent eruption we watch in disbelief that slowly settles into acceptance—the crumbling, cascading towers of the World Trade Center, for instance. In the days after 9/11, no writer I knew could write. It was the journalists who first told the stories, then the poets, then the short fiction writers, last of all, the novelists. Some of these turnings open for us like a flower blooming, slowly at first, then quickly, more quickly, like a fast motion video, from bud to dying petals dropping to the ground. The closer you are to ground zero, the more wrenched and wretched you feel. But where is ground zero these days? The streets of Rome are empty. The cafes in Paris are closed. Broadway theaters are dark. In my small university town in the heart of the country, the bars and restaurants are shut down. We walk our suburban streets, keeping our distance. Everyone is enormously polite. We smile. No one says much. We know we are all in this together, even if we don’t know quite what this is. Or how, from this irrevocable moment, nothing will ever again be the same.

My thanks to all the readers who signed up for the Goodreads Giveaway of Fire in Beulah. The winners have been selected and signed copies will be going out to them very soon. I'm grateful that so many signed up for a book that's not just newly released. This indicates a strong interest in historical fiction, I think, and the history of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in particular. Thank you all.

Fire in Beulah
I came to writing historical fiction not because I was so taken with history but because I wanted to understand the contemporary world I lived in. That world—Brooklyn, 1989, a world of landline phones and dot matrix printers and Betamax VCRs—is history now. But the human grief and joy and brutality that lived there then lives in us now and always. This was the year of the Central Park Five and the killing of Yusef Hawkins, a black youth surrounded by a gang of white boys in Bensonhurst; it was the year Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing debuted. It was also the year I learned about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. I wanted to write about that. And eventually I did, in my second novel, Fire in Beulah.

But the massacre didn’t explode from nothing; it came of what went before, and before, and before. To understand 1921, I had to go back before 1921. As my favorite historical novelist, Hilary Mantel, says: “Beneath every history, another history.”

To write about early twentieth century Oklahoma, I had to go back to Indian Territory in the late nineteenth. I had to learn how my people migrated to the Territory—and what they brought with them. I asked questions of living elders, read histories, traced elliptically through hearsay and conversation and handed-down narratives the outlines of how my family came by covered wagon into I.T. from Kentucky in 1887. That tracing and imagining became my first novel, The Mercy Seat.

Studying my way into the earliest days of Oklahoma’s story, trying to know what happened, and why, and above all how, I learned what has been for me the hardest lesson: that you can never know all you want to know. All you yearn to know.

In that book, a young girl finds a tin box holding her dead mother’s belongings; she tries to decipher her mother’s life through reading the items: a lock of hair, a cheap snuffbox, a charred torn-out page of scripture, a child’s pair of eyeglasses. But she comes to see that
. . . she could not know her mother’s life, not lived nor told nor unfolding in the strength of imagination nor in dream or vision. Her mother’s life was locked away from her, eternal, as she was locked away from all others, as we each are locked away from one another in the pores of finite mind and skin . . .

This is the metaphor, for me, for writing historical fiction. We’ll never know the truths of their lives, those precious or mediocre or loathsome ones who came before us; they’re locked away from us as the dead are locked away from the living, but we keep poring through the tin box anyway, reading artifacts, piecing mismatched parts together, creating the narrative from imperfect words. We become meticulous, devoted, open-minded, openhearted, humble enough to hide our hand, we hope. Still we see we’ll never know all we need to know.

But if we love this work, reading and writing historical fiction, we’re willing to work and work, even knowing we’ll have to submerge a good portion of what we learn, even knowing that, no matter how hard we try, we’ll still get things wrong.

It takes courage in all cases to be a writer, and a particular kind of courage to write outside one’s own lived experience, to try to create for readers the lived experiences of others in an era in which we have never lived, in a place where we’ve never lived—because, even if we have lived in our story’s location, inside our own period’s overlay, even if we travel (as we must do) to our story’s landscapes and cities, or study with intricate attention the paintings and photographs of the age, we can never experience the precise quality of light on the southern plains in 1837, or the ambient sounds on a Kansas City street in 1902, or the stench of burning flesh in 1546 in London, or on the streets of Tulsa in 1921.

For that, we must imagine.

So then we’re doing what all novelists of all genres and in all ages do: imagining our way into the lives of others, burrowing into their psyches, walking in their skins, finding our way, through imagery and language and sensory detail, into their world, and inviting readers inside with us. That’s the art of it, this great imagining, this welding of histories and artifacts and qualities of light to the human heart in all its joy and grief and suffering. Historical novelists aren’t writing to the past but to our own time. Each age has its obsessions, surely, but the fundamentals of the human story don’t change. We’re looking to create who we are now by imagining who we were before—who, indeed, we always have been.